gwright

FWIW, I read that to mean "not shared with the backend".

One of the reasons that Apple does a bit of due diligence during the onboarding of a developer and establishing a developer agreement is to ensure they can reliably take legal action against developers that abuse the system.

The possibility of being banned from the Apple App Store ecosystem and/or legal reprisals is one way to deter unwanted behavior that can't be blocked through technical means.

Scandinavia is not an example of socialism and these countries and aren't trying to implement "equity of outcomes".

We don't really need equality, we need an equitable outcome.

Let's set aside for a moment that it isn't even clear that "equitable outcome" at the level of a society is desirable, lets just consider the fact that every attempt to use force (i.e. government regulations, taxes, penalties, laws, etc.) to move significantly in that direction has resulted in catastrophe with the societies devolving into systems of corruption, authoritarianism, and scarcity. Have you discovered some new mechanism to avoid that outcome?

How many times do we need to experiment with communism, socialism, or other utopian philosophies before we realize they don't lead to a better society?

The Earth, without humans, has had much higher CO2 levels in the past and yet it isn't like Venus.

Nope. I was asserting that confusion comes from people believing that a "lossless" conversion exists. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

The biggest misunderstanding I see in these types of discussions is that there is a lossless conversion between binary floating point representation and decimal representation.

Very few values have exact decimal and binary floating point representations.

the env work is just to prevent Venus #2

There is no science-based predictions that climate change as we understand it today, will lead to Venus #2. That idea is just fodder for climate hysteria and sci-fi fantasy films.

It's a race between turning into venus and turning into mad max's thunderdome.

It is hard to tell how serious you are in that comment, but just in case, worrying about runaway greenhouse gas effect turning Earth into another Venus is climate hysteria.

Poorly thought out energy policies due to climate hysteria have a good chance at creating considerable political unrest though (not sure about "thunderdome" level of unrest).

Turns out when you restrict access to energy (e.g., by increasing its cost), people get upset.

Ruby is slow and encourages an esoteric convention over configuration style of OO code.

I think you are commenting on Rails, not Ruby when you refer to "convention over configuration". Even in Rails I'm not sure what "esoteric" means in your comment and that approach isn't even related to the object-oriented concepts.

the professors are literally practicing communism and giving away the book for free.

Ah, no. That isn't communism.

Does your theory apply to the content consumed during the training of LLMs? If not why not? Where should we draw the line regarding intellectual property rights?

Would you criminalize 'approaching' someone

That is a very misleading summarization. It is a short article. The law requires several conditions:

    * approach a police office
    * approach has to occur "knowingly or intentionally"
    * the officer has to be "lawfully engaged in the execution of his official duties"
    * the approach has to happen *after* the person has been ordered "stop approaching or retreat

Your definition of "solved" is quite a bit different than my definition of "solved". Especially if you are going to just pretend that the economics aren't to be included in the solution.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 90%. 90% of what?

You can't just have 90% of power generated by renewables and 10% by fossil fuels because there are times when you get 0% from renewables and so your fossil fuel plants need to provide 100% of the power. So you spent all that money on renewable infrastructure and didn't even get the benefit of shuttering your fossil fuel plants.

You are trying hard to misunderstand me. Don't communicate as if it is a solved problem if your solution has yet to be actually been built and successfully demonstrates the feasibility of the solution.

I'm not sure how to interpret your last sentence. A demonstration project, especially subsidized by the government, doesn't need to adhere to any sort of market pressure regarding the price of fossil fuels.

I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying it hasn't been done yet. How about we try it before pretending that we can shift to 100% renewables or before legislating transitions that we don't know how to accomplish.

Hawaii is trying hard, but it doesn't seem to be going well with the grid becoming less reliable. BTW, this video is a solid overview of the power situation in Hawaii: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbECmVdyWlQ&themeRefresh=1

I believe parts of the Azores have tried, but have not been successful.

I would be very interested in pointers to successful projects in this area.

My guess is that a power grid engineer would include capacity factors, but I've never seen the mass media, politicians, or advocacy groups think like an engineer in this regard. Even making that adjustment it doesn't factor in seasonal variations. Not understanding these factors results in ignorant headlines like:

California just ran on 100% renewable energy, but fossil fuels aren't fading away yet https://www.npr.org/2022/05/07/1097376890/for-a-brief-moment...

Renewables are now way cheaper than coal https://energynews.us/newsletter/renewables-are-now-way-chea...

You are correct that you can't create a stable, resilient grid just with intermittent renewables, you need storage.

But I don't think anyone has demonstrated long-term storage at grid scale, capable of storing power across seasons, which is needed in many areas. To be feasible the storage system has to be cheaper than maintaining some fossil fuel plants.

I haven't seen much about promising hydrogen storage systems.

I don't think I would describe Apple as a monopoly. But I would say that copyright and patent law helps tech companies, like Apple, by restraining competition.

Any particular reason you are picking on US companies? or big companies?

Most, if not all, monopolies are sustained by government via laws, regulations, and so on. So let's get specific, which monopolies do you think should be forced to split up and we can test that theory and see if we can identify what government actions sustain the monopoly.

Institutional reputation has never had much sway with me but what little it did have has pretty much evaporated of late.

But that's on the user. The user shouldn't get upset in that scenario and has no right to.

I agree. I also agree that when dealing with large numbers of people, there will be people who don't understand this and/or will actively try to social engineer their way out of their own decisions.

Setting customer expectations and meeting them successfully isn't easy.

You don't need a union to purchase this type of insurance for legal costs.

Do you really think your unique talents will save you from a lecherous boss or protect you from being discriminated against?

I don't understand how a union helps with this vs. an attorney. Other reasons for unions, but these items don't seem particularly persuasive to me.

I'm trying to understand what are the "hidden fees". Different fees, extra fees, annoying fees (when compared to some other country) I can wrap my head around those, but what fees are "hidden"?

More resources for "normal" business. Laying off large number of people isn't normal business and so there would be no expectation you had HR/security resources just sitting around waiting for that type of an event.

We're about to enter a world where wind solar EV have the clear economic advantage over coal gas ice.

I don't think this is true unless you assume some imminent improvement on grid scale power storage.

News reports about how cheap wind and solar are with supporting data based on levelized cost of energy (LCOE) completely miss the fact that intermittent power sources are not substitutes for base load generation. To approach true substitution you have to include overbuilding the intermittent sources or spending money on very expensive storage systems (that may not even exist yet). In either case the cost goes up considerably.

IMHO:

    * don't turn off nuclear plants
    * invest in more cost effective nuclear power
    * invest in more effective energy storage
    * invest in more effective solar/wind
    * don't pretend that energy infrastructure can be legislated into existence

Activism is activism regardless of whether it "strengthens individual rights" or not

My comment wasn't very clear, but I was trying to communicate that recognizing that the Constitution is centered around the idea of a limited federal government with explicit powers is not evidence of inappropriate "activism". Instead it is evidence of appropriate checks on federal overreach.

I don't know what to make of your statement "activism is activism". To be a useful term, "activism" needs to mean something other than "doing something" or "doing something that I disagree with".

If everything is "activism" then nothing is "activism".